Structure is one of the most difficult things for progressive rock bands to get right. How do you make a long, complicated song and have it all flow and cohere? Even many popular prog bands struggle with this, so I thought it would be fun to do a series on the different kind of structures used in prog and how to make each of them work.

King Crimson have a returned with a new lineup, and they played their first shows last week, with a heavy focus on material from the 1970s. This is surprising, as the post-1980 incarnations of KC only ever performed four songs from the ‘70s - ‘21st Century Schizoid Man’, 'The Talking Drum', ‘Larks Tongues in Aspic, Part II’, and ‘Red’, all of which are also being performed on this new tour, alongside seven other songs from the era. Since the band has finally decided that it is time to look backwards in a more traditional manner, I thought it would be fitting to devote a post to discussing the more unusual ways in which the band preferred to look backwards over the past two decades.

I've been talking a lot about motivic connections in King Crimson lately, so I thought I'd take a minute to point them out in a more unusual context: the title songs for the three Daniel Craig James Bond movies. These songs are very tightly linked in ways you may not have noticed. In case you haven't seen the films, here are the title sequences from all three films.